(Wine-Searcher) - Can a surge in interest in a summer favorite really be down to gummy bears?

There have been many reasons for a product making a sudden dash up our most-searched-for charts, but surely none have involved candy before.

Whispering Angel, the Provence rosé from Château d'Esclans, has been a popular drop for quite some time, but came screaming up the charts in the past month and it now sits in 33rd position on the list, an impressive achievement, given the only other rosé wine in the top 100 is the rather more salubrious – and pricey – Dom Pérignon Rosé.

Château d'Esclans' finest has a steady, if unspectacular search history on Wine-Searcher. It peaks in summer, as you would expect and falls away again in winter, often showing quite dramatic swings – in the six months from June to December 2012, for example, it went from 829th place on the list to 6825, although its low points have been shallower as more people got to hear about the wine.

It also gained a reputation as the summer drink of the Hamptons – there were even fears it would run out last summer, bringing gasps of horror from the residents – which has helped it along in its bid to make its mark on the wider wine-drinking marketplace.

But this year it hit new heights and, frankly, we're struggling to work out why. By March, it was at its highest ever rank on the list at #192. It increased its popularity with our users over the summer, as you would expect, hitting #84 by the end of June and climbing steeply since.

Is it a case of being reviewed on a widely watched TV show? We can't find any record of that. The mentions it has got in the press have been kind, but hardly the sort of reviews that send buyers screaming to the store, waving the Visa card. Nor, in all likelihood, can we put it down to a vast influx of Millennials to our site, so why has Whispering Angel been so madly sought-after this year?

Possibly there is an issue around supply – maybe the Hamptons folk are afraid of another shortage and are simply searching to reassure themselves that it is still out there. But the number of stores stocking Whispering Angel has increased more than sixfold in the past five years, from 175 stores to 1148. It isn't a worry about price hikes, either, as the price has remained remarkably and comfortingly stable – from an average price of $20 a bottle in 2011 to $21 today. (You can get this kind of information under the Details, Scores and Price History tab on any wine's search result page. Pro Version users can track wines back five years and compare them against benchmarks for similar wines. The Whispering Angel info is here.)

So, after exhaustive research that took several hours, we have arrived at a fairly undeniable conclusion: Whispering Angel's increased profile is down to gummy bears, specifically the ones released by Sugarfina, a luxury candy producer.

The Whispering Angel-infused gummies went on sale in June and such was the response that the company's website crashed and the entire run of the bears sold in two hours. There is currently a 14,000-strong waiting list for the candies.